Twentieth Century Socialism: What It Is Not; What It Is: How It May Come

by Edmond Kelly

Under this system the coöperative commonwealth will have goods to exchange with foreign countries and will to this extent be a merchant as regards all those things which it holds in excess of the needs of the community, and as regards that surplus which it may purchase from the farmer and the socialized industries. This leaves room for a system of private banks and private enterprises in international trade; for the farmer and the socialized industries will be free to trade their surplus through the government or through private individuals as they may consider most to their profit.

The distributive stores will present very much the same aspect as our department stores of to-day except that, though they may be even more gigantic in size, they are not likely to be as diverse; for a large proportion of the things now dealt in by department stores will doubtless remain in the hands of private industry. The essential duty of the state will be to provide its citizens with necessaries, not luxuries pertaining to taste and pleasure.

The state store will be divided into two departments, retail and wholesale; not that a different price need necessarily be charged in the retail than in the wholesale department, but because the machinery for furnishing builders with bricks is different from that for furnishing housewives with groceries. The state stores will also have a system for the regular delivery from door to door of such necessaries of life as are daily or at stated intervals consumed, e.g., milk, bread, coal, ice, meat, vegetables, and fruit, thereby applying postoffice economies to the distribution of these things.

The labor of distribution will be diminished by the slow transformation of city dwellings into gigantic apartment houses so constructed as to give the fullest supply of light and air to every room; and these apartment houses will have a distributing system of their own to the relief of the state.

As regards alcoholic drinks, the state will undoubtedly undertake the production of these with a view to taking this industry as far as possible out of private hands. It will not be necessary, however, to take it entirely out of private hands provided all private production is subjected to vigorous control. But the distribution of alcoholic liquors will probably be monopolized by the state on the Gothenburg plan with, perhaps, the important feature which characterizes the Public House Trust in England; that is, the persons in charge will receive a salary and an additional commission upon the sale of non-alcoholic drinks, but no commission on the sale of alcoholic drinks; and this with a view to giving the persons in charge an interest in selling non-alcoholic drinks. Under these circumstances, there will be no temptation to encourage drunkenness and the rule of not giving alcoholic drinks to persons already under the influence of liquor will be complied with.

It will be possible under such a general system for the state to serve as a medium for an exchange of labor that will greatly enhance the pleasure of life. Under existing conditions, the factory works summer as well as winter despite the fact that temperature makes work during the summer irksome and dangerous to health and life; and at the very time that the population is debilitated by being called upon to work in factories during the heat of June, July, and August, the farmer is in despair because he cannot find help to take in his harvest. Once industries are associated so that they have a definite knowledge of how much they have to produce, there is no reason why they should not so adjust the work of the factory as to keep it open during the eight cool months of the year, leaving the factory hands free to help the farmer in the country during the four hot months. The same thing holds good with the farmer who, during the short cold days of winter, has little to do on the farm and can, therefore, to his advantage as well as to the advantage of the community, devote those months to factory work. There need be nothing compulsory about this exchange, for socialized industry is master of its own time and can distribute its work throughout the year as it chooses. But the fact that the state is possessed of the knowledge how much is to be produced by every factory and how much by every farmer—how many men are needed in the winter in every factory and how many men in the summer on every farm, will enable the state to serve as a medium through which the factory hand can arrange to work on the farm during the summer and the farmer can arrange to work in the factory in the winter, if they respectively desire to do so.

It does not follow that the farmer is to be compelled to work long hours in the summer in the field and also in the factory during the winter; or the factory hand to give up his holiday in order to work on the farm during the summer. It has been shown that all the necessaries of life can probably be produced, even at the present time, by the adults in the community though they work no more than two hours and a half a day. If this be so, it would be easy so to adjust the work as to enable those who desire it to work more hours in the day and become entitled to so much longer vacation. The foregoing is only intended to show that in addition to the vacation which can be thus enjoyed, the farmer can relieve the monotonous existence of the farm during the winter months by work in the factory, and the factory hand can escape from factory conditions during the summer to his own advantage and to the advantage of the community at large.

Another object we have in view is to put an end to the anarchy which exists in all that part of our industry which has not been concentrated into trusts—the anarchy under which some things are produced in greater quantities than are needed, and some things needed are not produced in sufficient quantities—under which no producer can tell whether he is producing enough of a thing until the time for profiting by the knowledge has passed; no producer can tell whether he is producing too much of a thing until he is injured and even ruined by the discovery. It is, I think, obvious that all these objects are obtained by concentrating industry after the fashion of trusts in the hands of the men actually engaged in the process of production; by producing things not to make profit but to satisfy needs; and in the quantities which we know to be needed and not in quantities determined by the desire of the producer to make large profits cheeked only by the bankruptcy that attends production in larger quantities than the market will take.

Thus, the state orders thirty million tons of iron ore because we know that this amount of iron ore has served the needs of the country during a period of great activity, and will furnish not only all we can use ourselves in that year, but all that we can dispose of abroad. These thirty million tons represent then the maximum that we can usefully manufacture; and we can safely order thirty million tons because the state is not under the necessity to sell this iron to get gold with which to pay wages, rent, coal, and the running expenses of the factory. In a coöperative commonwealth there will be no rent to pay. The coal will be paid for in exactly the same way as the iron, by the issue of store orders.

The workers will get as nearly as possible the exact product of their work. There will be no capitalist who will take from them what the capitalist now takes, that is, about one-half of their earnings. Nor will those doing a low order of work receive as much as those doing a high order of work; every man will be paid according to his capacity; for we begin by assuming that the distribution of work according to capacity to-day is not far wrong, and so every man engaged in the steel industry will continue to receive the same wages as he received before with a certain prospect of an additional wage in the shape of profit, representing the difference in wage between the new conditions and the old.